I will share new products that I find to help our families affected with Autism and news stories that I find interesting.

Monday, January 25, 2016

Seeing the Spectrum

Interesting Article from The New Yorker

The world is unpredictable and disorderly. Sometimes your train is late;
sometimes it rains when it’s

not supposed to; the drugstore doesn’t
have the brand of dental floss you like. Boundaries are violated and
rules are ignored. The green spinach on your plate touches the white
chicken, and someone has bought your boxer shorts from J. C. Penney
instead of from Kmart. People are hard to figure out. Sometimes they
promise and don’t deliver; it’s not clear whether the expression on a
face is a smile or a sneer, or, if it is a smile, what it’s about.
People say things that they don’t mean literally: they tell jokes and
they use ironic expressions. Other people’s minds are a foreign country
in which we’re guests, tourists, or strangers, unsure where we are and
what’s expected of us.

Some people accept all this as the way things are in an imperfect world,
and they get on with life as best they can. Others find these
unpredictabilities intolerable. To cope, they construct physical and
mental neighborhoods where things are more regular and better arranged.
Repetition reassures, whether it’s to do with your environment, your
speech, or your bodily movements. People want these sorts of order with
different degrees of necessity, secure them with different kinds of
success, and, when they don’t succeed, react to failure with different
degrees of despair and disengagement.

The world has always been unpredictable and disorderly, and some people
have always found its ways unbearable. But there hasn’t always been
autism—or its related categories, Asperger’s syndrome and (the current
official term) autism-spectrum disorder. Autism was discovered, and
given its identity as a discrete pathological condition, by two
physicians working independently of each other during the Second World
War. One was Leo Kanner, an Austrian émigré at Johns Hopkins; the other
was Hans Asperger, who was working in Nazi-occupied Vienna and whose
findings were little known in the Anglophone world until the early
nineteen-eighties.

The discovery of autism carried with it the insistence that it had
always been there. Retrospective diagnosis is now something of a
subspecialty for both psychologists and historians, and the catalogue of
famous figures who have been placed on the spectrum now includes
Newton, Mozart, Beethoven, Jane Austen, Kant, Jefferson, Darwin, Lewis
Carroll, Emily Dickinson, and Wittgenstein. But the past was presumably
populated with countless uncelebrated people who might have received a
diagnosis. Some of these uncommunicative social isolates were likely
misdiagnosed at various times as suffering from other psychiatric
disorders—“imbecility,” “mental retardation,” schizophrenia. (Kanner
gestured toward that history, borrowing the word “autism,” derived from
the Greek for “self,” from a sort of social isolation then attributed to
schizophrenia.) Sometimes they were treated with hideous cruelty, and
sometimes with surprising indulgence. Others lived their lives outside
historical systems of medical diagnosis and management, and were
probably just considered “eccentric”—one of the accepted ways of being
normally abnormal.

As a result of Kanner’s and Asperger’s findings, many people were
transferred from one psychiatric category to another. In the early part
of the twentieth century, children who would now be diagnosed as
autistic were often dumped in mental institutions. Parents were
routinely counselled to forget about their afflicted children—whose
symptoms typically became clear at around two years of age—and to move
on with their lives. Kanner’s new category came as welcome news for
parents who could not bring themselves to institutionalize their
children, and who were certain that there was an intelligent, feeling
person locked inside what’s sometimes called “the mask of autism.”